Simon Smith was plenary/keynote speaker at an international conference in New Zealand

Simon Smith was plenary/keynote speaker at an international conference in New Zealand

Simon in front of the University of Auckland’s iconic clock tower

Associate Professor Simon Smith was invited to be a plenary speaker (keynote) at a pure mathematics conference in New Zealand, at the University of Auckland. The conference was “Symmetries of Discrete Objects”, and attracted world experts from group theory and combinatorics from around the world. Simon talked about his work with Dr Colin Reid: the two researchers have developed a new theory for groups acting on trees, called the Theory of Local Action Diagrams. It has potential applications in a great many areas of pure mathematics.

There were five plenary speakers in total. One of the other plenary speakers was Dr Stephan Tornier from the University of Newcastle in Australia. His talk was about applying Dr Smith and Dr Reid’s Theory of Local Action Diagrams to detect the type of independent actions on trees. This work has applications to computational group theory.